In a typical hard disk drive (HDD), servo sectors on the disk are used to provide position information about the location of a magnetic head over a disk surface. A common approach for writing such servo information on one or more disk surfaces in an HDD is referred to as spiral-based self-servo writing, or spiral-based SSW. According to this approach, multiple spiral-shaped servo information patterns (or “servo spirals”) are written on at least one disk surface prior to the SSW process. During the SSW process, a magnetic head of the HDD is positioned relative to a disk surface based on timing and position information in the servo spirals, so that the final servo information (the servo sectors) can be written on the disk surface by the magnetic head. In this way, the HDD itself writes the servo sectors on each disk surface.
Since each disk surface of modern HDDs typically include many thousands of tracks, the processing time for an HDD to write servo sectors in this way can be multiple days. Since longer processing time increases the overall cost of an HDD, there is a need in the art for techniques that can reduce the duration of the SSW process.